Educating%20in%20Bulk:%20The%20Introductory%20Physics%20Course%20Revisions%20at%20Illinois%20%20Mats%20Selen,%20UIUC%20Department%20of%20Physics

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Educating in BulkThe Introductory Physics
Course Revisions at Illinois Mats Selen, UIUC
Department of Physics

• Our Clients
• Faculty, Students, College of Engineering, U of
  I
• Our approach
• Infrastructure
• Pedagogy
• Technology
• Some Research Results
• The particle physics approach.
• Physics 100
• Helping under-prepared students
• Deep thoughts
• Just Do It

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Our Clients
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How it used to work

• Tradition, Tradition, Tradition
• Lecturer owns the course and is free to
  reinvent the flat tire every semester.
• Discussion TAs pretty much on their own.
• Labs intellectually disconnected from rest of
  course.
• Typically only quantitative problems on exams.
• RESULTS NOBODY IS HAPPY !!
• Lecturer dislikes it since its a monster
  teaching assignment.
• Students dislike it because they see the
  lecturer dislikes it and because the
  organization is often uneven at best.

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How we do it now

• Integrate all aspects of a course using active
  learning methods in a team teaching environment.
• Typically 3 faculty share the load for a class
• Lecturer (lectures, ACTs, preflights, exams).
• Discussion Director (TA training, quizzes,
  exams).
• Lab Director (TA training, web homework, exams).
• Course administration is shared responsibility
• Faculty meet at least once a week with each-other
  and with their TAs to plan the campaign.
• Overall co-ordination is very tight (web helps
  this).
• Everybody works on creating exams.
• Course material changes adiabatically
• Recycled tuned from semester to semester.
• People dont need to re-invent the whole stew,
  but can focus on the spices!

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Advantages of this approach

• Existing (evolving) infrastructure lowers the bar
  for participation.
• This is now seen as a reasonable teaching load.
• Most of our new junior faculty start teaching in
  these courses (i.e. not a heavy assignment).
• Pain Gain are shared
• No burnout No heroes.
• Makes it possible to keep quality high and
  material consistent even though instructors are
  changing.

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Feedback (are things better now ?)
THE NEW Spring 01 Total Physics
TAs 75 Excellent 58 77
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THE OLD Spring 95 Total Physics
TAs 77 Excellent 15 19
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Details of some key components

• WEB-centric organization
• Peer instruction in Discussion Lab sections
• ACTs Preflights in Lecture
• Homework Interactive Examples
• Exams

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WEB-centric organization

• All course materials available on-line.
• Lectures, discussion lab materials, exams
• Makes our job easier (copy spring01 ? fall01).
• All students do several on-line assignments every
  week
• Homework, Interactive Examples, Quizzes
• Preflights for lectures, labs discussion
• Exam preparation exam results
• All grades progress throughout the semester
• Students know in advance what everything is worth
  and the final thresholds for A,B,C,D,F etc

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Details of some key components

• WEB-centric organization
• Peer instruction in Discussion Lab sections
• ACTs Preflights in Lecture
• Homework Interactive Examples
• Exams

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Discussion Sections
NO LECTURING HERE

• Key Idea Collaborative Learning
• Students work in groups of 4 on problems prepared
  by the senior staff. TAs act as facilitators,
  not lecturers.
• TA preparation very important (extensive training
  program).
• Orientation, Weekly Meetings, Mentor TAs,
  Observation
• Content of prepared materials very important

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Lab Sections

• PREDICT
• OBSERVE
• EXPLAIN

• Engage the students in the learning process and
  promote mastery of concepts by manipulation of
  experimental apparatus.
• Web-based Prelabs Lab reports finished within
  class period.

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Details of some key components

• WEB-centric organization
• Peer instruction in Discussion Lab sections
• ACTs Preflights in Lecture
• Homework Interactive Examples
• Exams

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Pre-Flights !!

• Students are asked to answer a set of conceptual
  questions (on the Web) prior to every lecture
  (and discussion, and lab).
• The main structure is
• Students read about material in text.
• Students answer pre-flight questions on material
  prior to lecture.
• Physics 101 PFs due at 6am, lecture starts at
  1pm.
• Graded on participation, not correctness.
• Instructor uses pre-flight responses to guide
  lecture preparation.
• Pre-flights are reviewed during lecture, often
  presented again as ACTs, and often capped off
  with a demo.
• Use their own words, (both right wrong)
• With careful preparation, the pre-flights can
  form the backbone of the lecture.

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What the students see on the web
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The instructors interface to thestudent
responses (also on web)
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Lecture 6, Pre-Flight Questions 78

• Two identical boxes, each having a weight W, are
  tied to the ends of a string hung over a pulley
  (see picture).
• What is the tension T in the string?
• 1. T0 2. TW 3. T2W

This is exactly what Iprepare before and show
during the lecture
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Students see their own answers

• Two identical boxes, each having a weight W, are
  tied to the ends of a string hung over a pulley
  (see picture).
• What is the tension T in the string? 1. T0
  2. TW 3. T2W

Due to Newton's second and third laws, the rope
itself is massless, so any force transmitted
across it is done so without the diminishing of
any magnitude. As each box has an equal weight,
the tension T must be zero, as each box's force
cancels the other's out.
The force applied to the rope is transmitted to
the other side. This example would be just like a
person hoisting up a box, pulling on the rope
with a force of W. In this case, the tension
would just be W.
The string has the tension of two weights.
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Students have fun with answers...

• Shown is a yummy doughnut. Where would you
  expect the center of mass of this breakfast of
  champions to be located? (Explain your reasoning
  Homer).

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Details of some key components

• WEB-centric organization
• Peer instruction in Discussion Lab sections
• ACTs Preflights in Lecture
• Homework Interactive Examples
• Exams

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Interactive Examples (Socratic Dialogue)
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Details of some key components

• WEB-centric organization
• Peer instruction in Discussion Lab sections
• ACTs Preflights in Lecture
• Homework Interactive Examples
• Exams

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Students are happierbut are they learning more
??
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For Example Do BEFORE vs AFTER study to see if
student learning was impacted by the
introduction of Interactive Examples (IEs)
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Homework BExample

• Given C1, C3, and C4
• Three Qualitative
• Compare Q1 and Q4
• Compare Q1 and Q3
• How does energy change if dielectric added to
  C2?
• Two Quantitative
• Given Q1 and E, what is C2?
• Given Q1 and E, what is V3?

• Four different versions given each week
• Total of 269 different questions!!

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Homework B Analysis

• The Homework B questions have a wide variation in
  difficulty

Computing the total Homework B average (pre-IE),
we see Fall Avg 63.2 ? 0.2 Spring Avg
67.8 ? 0.3 We take this difference as a
measure of the difference in populations,
on-sequence vs off-sequence. Until we
understand how to correct for this difference, we
will compare only Spring to Spring and Fall to
Fall.
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Homework B Pre IEs

• Compare performance on Homework B questions (269
  total!) in Physics 112 between Spring99 and
  Spring00 (pre IEs)

Looks pretty similar.. We try to quantify..
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Distribution of Differences
Create model from the following input Question
Difficulty Distribution Student Performance
Distribution Run simulation of two identical
semesters and plot d distribution
Model Works
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Compare Performance Post IE Pre IE
CONCLUSION Systematic Improvement in all
semesters ofboth courses!
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More Observations On avg, HWB score has
improved by 1.6s
Physics 112
Sp02 Fa02
Look in a little more detail at these 47
questions (18
of total)

• Were improvements made in qualitative or
  quantitative questions?
• Qualitative/Conceptual 35 questions
• Quantitative 12 questions
• Improvement occurs uniformly in both areas
• fraction of all HWB questions that are
  quantitative 25
• Very encouraging, but much more work is needed to
  understand this.

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Is Easy to Forget that Physics is Hard
And its even worse if you are not well prepared !
Can we help under-prepared students to get it ?
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Physics 100Thinking About Physics (1 credit
hour)
Why

• Despite the University of Illinois C of E very
  high admission standards, nearly 20 of accepted
  students are inadequately prepared to pass our
  introductory mechanics course Physics 111(i.e.
  they earn a D or F).
• The failure rate is even higher for minority
  groups.
• As high as 68 for African Americans !!(About
  six times higher than the average)
• Many students do not realize that they are poorly
  prepared.
• We need to identify inadequately prepared
  students and help them gear up for Physics 111
  and beyond.

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How...

• Typical Physics 100 enrollment 100
• Getting students is a challengenext slide.
• Course Format
• Online Asynchronous Lectures (interactive
  slides with sound)
• Online Homework (heavy use of Interactive
  Examples)
• Two hour discussion/tutorial once per week
  (expert instructors)
• Material covered is first 30 of Physics 111
• Follow-up prep classes in with Physics 111
  112

• Physics 100 does not start until 3 weeks into
  the fall semester.
• Gives students time to evaluate their situation
• Many decide to take Physics 100 after doing
  poorly on the first Physics 111 mid-term exam.

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How

• Identify students at the beginning of the
  semester using an online Self Evaluation quiz in
  Engineering-100.
• Students receiving a score below a certain cutoff
  are invited to take Physics 100 (1
  credit-hour).
• Fewer than half of identified students choose to
  participate initially. (This should be a
  placement exam!)

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Is Physics 100 helping students ?
Q Can we reduce the failure rate of
under-prepared students taking Physics
111/112/113/114 ? A Probably YES (research by
Gladding Shoaf)
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Is Physics 100 helping students

• It seems like we might be helping, however there
  is a is a big caveat Physics 100 students are
  self selected !
• Are we getting only those students that were
  going to do well anyway ?
• We need more data to study this.
• A real placement test would be very helpful !

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Summing Up

• We have revised all of our big intro classes
  (both calculus and algebra based).
• So far so good.
• Feedback very positive.
• Students like it, the faculty likes it, the
  University likes it.
• Maintaining momentum will be the challenge for
  the future
• Our Physics Education Research Group is growing
• This is becoming a real PhD research program
• Graduate students are very interested
• We have lots of data and many analysis ideas
  (like CLEO)!
• Other projects
• New Inquiry based physics course for
  elementary-ed students
• K-5 teachers need more science.
• Im very excited about thisask me later.

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Concluding Thoughts

• Strong departmental support is needed to pull
  this off
• Vision, leadership, money (faculty release
  time).
• Developing a sustainable infrastructure is the
  first part of the battle.
• We are eager to give away any/all of the
  materials tools we have developed, and (of
  course) hope to get new ideas back.
• Getting faculty to buy in is the second
  necessary ingredient.
• Not everyone likes this approach.

• At UIUC, most people have bought in to the new
  way.
• 42 of 70 faculty have taught in these courses
  since 1995 !